The Corrosive Hagiography of Muslim Spain

By
Andrew G. Bostom

Celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a
“…return of Islam to Spain” marked the completion
of the new Granada Mosque1. Unfortunately, at
a conference entitled, “Islam in Europe” that
accompanied the opening of the mosque, some alarming
statements were made by European Muslim leaders. For
example, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar
Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader,
implored Muslims to cause an economic collapse of
Western economies (by switching to gold dinars, and
ceasing to use Western currencies), while the German
Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told attendees not to
adapt their Islamic religious practices to accommodate
European (i.e., Western Enlightenment ?) values2.

Although a recent Wall Street Journal editorialist
chastised Spanish authorities for their apparent lack of
“…influence or
knowledge regarding the new mosque’s direction”,
the author of this op-ed then undermined the sound
factual basis for his concerns with a romanticized,
ahistorical synopsis of Muslim Spain, noting what he
termed the “pan-confessional
humanism” of Andalusian Islam, and even
asserting, “
…one could argue that the oft-bewailed missing
‘reformation’ of Islam was under way there until it
was aborted by the Inquisition”3. In
her 2002 hagiography of Muslim Spain, “The Ornament of
the World”4, María Rosa Menocal, Yale
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, claimed,
"The new Islamic
polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive,
but following Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected
them.”. I maintain that reiterating these sorts
of historically inaccurate, to wildly exaggerated claims
regarding Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist
agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed
“Euro-Islam” fully compatible with
post-Enlightenment Western values.

Jihad
conquests were pursued century after century, from the
Indian subcontinent to the Iberian peninsula, because jihad,
which means “to strive in the path of Allah,”
embodied an ideology and a jurisdiction. The basic
pattern of the jihad
war is captured in the great Muslim historian al-Tabari’s recording of the recommendation given by Umar b. al-Khattab
to the commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636
C.E.), during the conquest of Iraq. Umar (the second
“Rightly Guided Caliph”) reportedly said:

“Summon
the people to God; those who respond to your call,
accept it from them, (This is to say, accept their
conversion as genuine and refrain from fighting them)
but those who refuse must pay the poll tax out of
humiliation and lowliness. (Qur’an 9:29) If they
refuse this, it is the sword without leniency. Fear God
with regard to what you have been entrusted.”5

Jihad was formally conceived by Muslim jurisconsults
and theologians from the 8th to 9th
centuries onward, based on their interpretation
of Qur’anic verses 6 (for e.g., 9:5,6;
9:29; 4:76-79; 2: 214-15; 8:39-42), and long chapters in
the Traditions (i.e., “hadith”, acts and sayings of
the Prophet Muhammad, especially those recorded by al-Bukhari
[d. 869] 7 and Muslim [d. 874] 8).
The consensus on the nature of jihad from all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence (i.e., Maliki,
Hanbali, Hanafi,
and Shafi’i) is clear. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), jurist,
renowned philosopher, historian, and sociologist,
summarized these consensus opinions from five centuries
of prior Muslim jurisprudence with regard to the
uniquely Islamic institution of jihad:

“In
the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty,
because of the universalism of the [Muslim] mission and
[the obligation to] convert everybody to Islam either by
persuasion or by
force... The other religious groups did not have a
universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious
duty for them, save only for purposes of defense...
Islam is under obligation to gain power over other
nations.” 9

Muslim Spain was a country of
constant jihad ruled under Maliki jurisdiction, which provided a severe,
repressive interpretation of Islamic law10.
For example, the Maliki jurist Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani
(d. 996), characterized jihad
as follows:

“Jihad
is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by
certain individuals may dispense others from it. We
Malikis maintain that it is preferable not to begin
hostilities with the enemy before having invited the
latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the
enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either
converting
to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya),
short of which war will be declared against them.”11

“No…Jew or
Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an
aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy
individual; on the contrary they must be detested and
avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the
greeting, ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan
has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget
God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s
party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the
losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]).
A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order
that they may be recognized and this will be for them a
form of disgrace.”12

The indigenous Christians and Jews of Spain,
conquered by the Arab Muslim jihad
wars, thus submitted to Islamic domination under a
"Pact"--or Dhimma--which imposed degrading and
discriminatory regulations, consistent with the
Qur’anic injunction in 9:29. The main principles of
this “dhimmitude” were : (i) the inequality
of rights in all domains between Muslims and dhimmis;
(ii) the social and economic discrimination against the
dhimmis; (iii) the humiliation and vulnerability of the
dhimmis13. And there were dire consequences
for infidel dhimmis in Muslim Spain who rebelled against
the repressive Dhimma: slaughter of the rebels, and
enslavement of their women and children14.

In addition to a small minority of privileged
Christian notables, Muslim Spain was populated by tens
of thousands of Christian slaves, and humiliated and
oppressed Christian dhimmis.
The muwallads (neo-converts to Islam) were in nearly
perpetual revolt against the Arab immigrants who had
claimed large estates for themselves, farmed by
Christian serfs or slaves. Expropriations and fiscal
extortions ignited the flames of continual rebellion by
both muwallads and mozarabs (Christian dhimmis)
throughout the Iberian peninsula. Leaders of these
rebellions were crucified, and their insurgent followers
were put to the sword. These bloody conflicts, which
occurred throughout the Hispano-Umayyad emirate until
the tenth century, fueled endemic religious hatred. An
828 C.E. letter from Louis the Pious to the Christians
of Merida summarized their plight under Abd al-Rahman
II, and during the preceeding reign: confiscation of
their property, unfair increase of their exacted
tribute, removal of their freedom (probably meaning
slavery), and oppression by excessive taxes15.

In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela,
and his son Joseph, who protected a once flourishing
Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to
1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish
population by the local Muslim community. At least three
thousand Jews perished in an uprising surrounding the
1066 assassination, alone16. The Muslim
Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232)
wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and
Christian populations. This devastation- massacre,
captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the
Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham
Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish
converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e.,
antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three
centuries) removed the children from such families,
placing them in the care of Muslim educators17.
Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and
physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had
to flee Cordova with his entire family in 1148,
temporarily residing in Fez- disguised as a Muslim-
before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although
Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of
Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule
of Muslim Spain, his own words debunk this utopian view
of the Islamic treatment of Jews:

"..the Arabs have
persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and
discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a
nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as
they.."18

The eminent historian of
Islam, Bernard Lewis, observed 35 years ago that
nineteenth-century “Pro-Islamic” Jews promoted a
utopian view of the egalitarian nature of Islamic rule,
particularly in Muslim Spain. Not surprisingly,
Muslims eventually also picked up on this romantic
Jewish myth about Islam, which became a standard part of
their own self-image. However, Lewis concludes,

"…The
Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it
was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for
Islam.”.19

An accurate assessment of interfaith relationships in
Muslim Spain, and the contemporary currents responsible
for obfuscating that history, can be found in Richard
Fletcher's very engaging “Moorish Spain”. Mr.
Fletcher offers these sobering, unassailable
observations:

"The witness of
those who lived through the horrors of the Berber
conquest, of the Andalusian fitnah in the early eleventh century, of the Almoravid invasion- to
mention only a few disruptive episodes- must give it
[i.e., the roseate view of Muslim Spain] the lie. The
simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish
Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was of
tranquility...Tolerance? Ask the Jews of Granada who
were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were
deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126 (like the
Moriscos five centuries later)…In the second half of
the twentieth century a new agent of obfuscation makes
its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience,
which sees the evils of colonialism- assumed rather than
demonstrated-foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of
al-Andalus and the persecution of the Moriscos (but not,
oddly, in the Moorish conquest and colonization). Stir
the mix well together and issue it free to credulous
academics and media persons throughout the western
world. Then pour it generously over the truth…in the
cultural conditions that prevail in the west today the
past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed
it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a
state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent
fantasies of glamour...do wonders for sharpening up its
image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and
enlightened society even in its most cultivated
epoch."20

Finally, even if deemed
“tolerant” for Medieval civilization, dhimmitude is
completely incompatible with modern notions of equality
between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At
the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist
that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment
societal standards of equality, not “tolerance”,
abandoning forever their hagiography of the repressive,
discriminatory standards practiced by the classical
Maliki jurists of “enlightened” Muslim Spain.

Andrew
G. Bostom, MD, MS, is an Associate Professor of Medicine
at Brown University Medical School, and a freelance
writer on jihad and dhimmitude.

5. Al-Tabari, “The
History of al-Tabari (Ta’rikh al rusul wa’l-muluk)”,
vol. 12, The Battle of Qadissiyah and the Conquest of
Syria and Palestine, translated by Yohanan Friedman,
(Albany, NY.: State University of New York Press, 1992).